Greg Scoblete at RCW
takes us to task for advocating arming a faction among the
Syrian militia as an advisable course of action.

This is a common lament, both among pro-interventionist Western
commentators and among Syrian rebel forces themselves.

But how true is it? Let’s presume the U.S. arms the rebels – but
only the Good Ones Who Share Our
Values – and they’re able to fight more effectively against
Assad’s forces.

Will the jihadists decide to quit the battlefield? Why would they
do that?

Are we supposed to assume that the Syrian forces fighting the
Assad regime will instantly turn their guns on the jihadists in
their midst if and when they succeed in overthrowing Assad? Won’t
they have bigger fish to fry at that point?

These are valid concerns. U.S. support for rebels in Syria is
very unlikely to produce a post-war Syrian government that we
like. In fact, what we need to understand in all of this that we
aren’t going to like the new Syrian government very much. It’s
probably going to be less free, more anti-Israel, and
significantly more Islamist than we would want. It’s likely that
there will be revenge killings and even bloodbaths along the way.

Syria is a lot like Lebanon’s bigger, uglier, and meaner brother.
The ethnic and religious tensions that produced decades of civil
war in Lebanon are also present in Syria. The Assad dictatorship
imposed a rigid order on Syria, but as the dictatorship crumbles
the divisions are coming back into public view. Unless we were
willing to put tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of troops in
Syria and keep them there for a long time, often fighting bad
guys and getting attacked by suicide bombers, we don’t stand much
chance of building and orderly and stable society there,
much less an open and free one.

I don’t think the United States has the will to do this right
now, and beyond pure humanitarian grounds it is hard to see that
such a course would serve the national interest. However, even if
our Syria policy isn’t about achieving something good, we should
still be thinking about what we can do that reduces the chances
of things getting catastrophically worse.

The worst case for the United States in a post-Assad Syria would
be that groups linked to al-Qaeda become dominant players either
in the country’s government as a whole or in control of
significant regions in a country that fragments. Such groups
would be nests of terrorists acting to destabilize not only Syria
itself but Iraq, Lebanon, and the wider Middle East. They would
certainly be active in Russia and, through extensive ties with
the Arab diaspora in Europe, add considerably to the security
headaches the West faces. They would be actively working to
destabilize governments across the Arab world as well and
providing shelter, training, and arms to terrorists from all
over. In a worst, worst case scenario, they get hold of Assad’s
WMD stockpiles and start passing them out to their friends.

The United States does not want any of this to happen. We could
not long stand idly by if it did.

Aiding the less ugly, less bad guys in the Syrian resistance, and
even finding a few actual good guys to support, isn’t about
installing a pro-American government in post civil war Syria.
It’s about minimizing the prospects for a worst-case scenario—by
shortening the era of conflict and so, hopefully, reducing the
radicalization of the population and limiting the prospects that
Syrian society as a whole will descend into all-out chaotic
massacres and civil conflict. And it’s about making sure that
other people in Syria, unsavory on other grounds as they may be,
who don’t like al-Qaeda type groups and don’t want them to
establish a permanent presence in the country, have enough guns
and ammunition to get their way.

This is not a plan to edge the United States toward military
engagement in Syria; it is aimed at reducing the chance that
American forces will need to get involved. And, by accelerating
the overthrow of Assad, it’s also a strategy for putting more
pressure on Iran, pressure that represents our best hope of
avoiding war with the mullahs as well. The whole point here is to
keep our troops at home.

If the United States hadn’t gotten itself distracted by the
ill-considered intervention in Libya, we might have acted in
Syria at an earlier stage, when there were some better options on
the table. But we are past that now; the White House
humanitarians did what humanitarians often do—inadvertently
promoting a worse disaster in one place (in this case, Syria) by
failing to integrate their humanitarian impulses (in Libya) with
strategic reflection. This kind of strategic incompetence is the
greatest single flaw in the humanitarian approach to foreign
policy. It has led to untold misery in the past and will likely
lead to many more bloodbaths in the future. Unfortunately, warm
hearted fuzzy brained humanitarianism is one of the world’s
greatest killers.

The situation in Syria now isn’t about doing good or preventing
bloodbaths. The bloodbath is here and there is not a lot of good
that can be done within the range of our capacity and will. This
is now all about trying to prevent the worst rather than
promoting the best. It means arming people, many of whom we don’t
like and who don’t like us, to reduce the likelihood of a
dangerous increase in the power of people who consider themselves
at war with us and our friends.

One option
people are talking about is to assist defected Syrian
officers in a military council to oversee the rebels. Manaf Tlass
and his colleagues might be able to establish some kind of
unified command that could funnel weapons from the Gulf to
certain rebel brigades, marginalize the terrorists, and, if Assad
falls, maintain some semblance of order to prevent even worse
chaos and bloodbath from erupting across the country. We don’t
have the intel here at Via Meadia that would let us
judge whether Tlass and company are our best bet—but something
like this may need to be tried.

There is nothing nice or pretty about this, and we don’t expect
much good to come out of it. But bad policy decisions in the past
combine with the increasingly dangerous situation on the ground
to paint us in a corner where we don’t have much choice.